Tag Archives: theory

This article originally appeared on Medium and was republished with the author’s permission. You can read it in its original form here.

By Anne Gibbon

Design thinking is beloved by many, and is more than a flash in the long list of new management tools. Why? Because it’s embodied learning. In recruiting your body, emotions, and rational brain to explore problems with others, we get to better solutions than pondering them alone in a cubicle. But for messy problems and large bureaucracies, design thinking alone isn’t sufficient. Systems dynamics appears to be the discipline of choice, but up to this point, the theoretical underpinnings have been developed to the exclusivity of embodied exercises.

This is my story of learning to facilitate design thinking as an embodied experience, rather than an intellectual exercise, and to begin to include systems thinking into the work. I have faith that the small prototypes will eventually snowball and make a greater impact than well written policy think pieces alone.

I confess, I put bandaids over my piercings. I never should have done that, I should have just taken them out — but the piercings are more me than the uniform these days.

Thirteen months after finishing ten years of service in the Navy, and days after finishing a fellowship at Stanford’s Design School, I put my foot down and really stretched my rebel wings. I got a very small nose piercing and three studs in one ear, most people don’t even notice them. But to me they are freedom. My problem: I still had to show up at Navy Reserve drill weekends with a proper uniform on. Too bad I never did ‘uniform inspection’ very well. One weekend someone complained about my pink nail polish and the gold ball earrings that were 2mm too big; I think she would have fallen out of her chair if she had discovered the band aids weren’t covering scratches.

The author leads a workshop at the Silicon Valley Innovation Academy in July 2015

For the last two years of running design thinking workshops for various ranks and departments of the military, I have done the equivalent of putting band aids on piercings. We used Post-It notes and sharpies, but I usually left the improv at home. And the effect was an often neutered process. I led the groups through exercises and talked about modes of thinking — deductive, abductive, and inductive — as a way to make the creative, messy work more palatable to people who spent lives in frameworks so narrowly defined that playing at charades with their colleagues would have represented an existential crisis.

November 2013, our d.school fellows group hard at work

Design thinking has been the bright shiny magic wand that somehow hasn’t lost its luster. HBR gave it some east coast gravitas by featuring the process on the cover of their September issue. Popular in many management and product design circles, design thinking continues to spread. The White House just published a post about the use of Human Centered Design (HCD) by the USDA and the Office of Personnel Management’s Innovation Lab to improve the National School Lunch Program. My parents are still confused that I make a living writing on post its, but I feel lucky to be one of the many professionals using this process and adapting it for the real world. Fred Collopy, a professor of design and innovation at Case Western University has spent a career immersed in the theories of decision science, systems thinking, and design. He makes the point that design thinking has been so successful as a practical tool to effect change in organizations precisely because practitioners engage with it first by doing — not by thinking through the associated theories. Fred makes the point that systems thinking failed to spread widely as a management tool, not because it isn’t applicable, but because the discipline didn’t make the leap from theory to embodied exercises. The arcane details of the theories were and are hotly debated by a few, with the result being that the practical exercise of the main concepts are lost to the rest.

In large part, design thinking has avoided this trap because some of the most successful schools teaching the process are schools of practice, not ivory towers of thought. While I personally love dissecting the minutiaeof different modes of thinking, the advances in neuroscience that allow us to explore augmented sensing, and the role that the autonomic nervous system plays in reaching creative insight, I reserve that for my fellow design practitioners. I’ve learned that when I’m leading a workshop, my job is to be the chief risk taker for the group, the leader in vulnerability. Their job is to embody each step in the process, and by fully immersing themselves, stumble into surprising reframes, 1000 ideas for a solution, and a few brilliant, wobbly prototypes.

While Fred’s article describes design thinking more as an evolution to systems thinking, I see them as complementary disciplines. Systems dynamics is worth plumbing intellectually, but for the purpose of emerging on the other side with methods and exercises that can be used as tools in the world, similar to the 5 step design thinking process from Stanford’s dschool. The complex theories associated with systems thinking and systems dynamics have at their root a set of ideas very similar to design thinking — engaging a broad set of stakeholders, using scenarios to explore them, reframing problems, and iterating. I want to explore what they might do together, with both disciplines having a rich underpinning of theory and accessible, embodied exercises.

Over a period of about seven months this year, I consulted (civilian role, not reservist) for the Pacific Fleet. I worked for a staff function in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and got the best of both worlds — the camaraderie that is a unique joy known to those who have served, and the luxury of wearing hot pink jeans to work. I learned a lot about myself as a designer and a facilitator. At the end of those months, I wrote a long report on how design thinking and systems dynamics might serve the vision of the Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral Swift. The staff that hired me didn’t ask for any insights on systems dynamics, but I gave it to them anyways.

The Pacific Fleet needs uniformed practitioners of design thinking and systems dynamics who understand the theoretical nuances and who can also lead the embodiment of the exercises. They need this because the messy military problem they concern themselves with — maritime security — can’t be silo’ed into the pieces that only relate to the military, leaving other aspects to diplomats and environmentalists. Maritime security in our era is about rapidly declining natural resources, extreme climate events, rising levels of violence at sea, but more importantly, these different forces affecting maritime security are so interconnected that they require intense collaboration with unexpected partners. I fear that if we frame the problem of maritime security as an issue between great powers best left to great navies, we will miss the dynamics influencing the global system that supports human flourishing — our food, our climate, and many people’s freedom. (Did you know about the extent of slavery at sea?)

Global Fishing Watch, the prototype from Google, Oceana and SkyTruth to use open source satellite data to identify illegal fishing.

I don’t have a suggestion for how to frame the problem of human flourishing and maritime security in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. I have my own opinions, but I would rather they be challenged and iterated on through a process that mixes systems and design thinking. How should the Pacific Fleet approach the challenge of understanding and leveraging the system of maritime security in Indo-Asia? Instead of policy, I suggest behaviors I think Admiral Swift would want to observe as patterns in his Fleet.

Encouraged collaboration — Leaders emerge from the crowd, assume the role of creative facilitator, and ensure collaboration when it’s needed.

Innovation at sea — Sailors innovating ‘just in time’ on deployment lead to non-traditional employment of fielded capability.

Using patterns — Sailors provide context, not single data points. Leaders guide the mastery of knowledge and foment the curiosity to identify and exploit patterns of action.

Decentralized Execution — Leaders prepare subordinates to be decision-makers, challenging them to gain insights on context and patterns.

The crowd organizes itself — Communities of interest will proliferate, building networks between the silos of the operational, maintenance, and R&D force.

The crowd learns together — The Fleet leads the debate of war fighting instructions and populates a shared electronic repository of FAQ’s and how-to resources.

My contract ended with the Pacific Fleet at the end of July, and in keeping with my commitment to spread my wings, I’m leaving for New Zealand to work and play with food and agriculture technology and innovation ecosystems. But first, my own embodied prototype of decentralized execution. On October 26 and 27, a couple friends, a senior officer at the Department of State and a PhD futurist, and I will co-facilitate a design workshop in San Francisco on maritime security. We’re inviting a wildly diverse group of participants and we’re going to test new methods for embodied systems thinking. There’s no contract guaranteeing pay and no senior leader who has promised to take the prototypes from the workshop and shepherd them to execution.

Which means there are no rules on this adventure. We’ll publish the exercises mixing systems dynamics and design thinking, and we’ll share the prototypes — hopefully you’ll test them. Please get in touch if you’re interested in more detail.

This book will make the case that with respect to China, U.S. policymakers will be wise to focus on China’s projected military capabilities and waste little effort attempting to discern the current or future intentions of China’s leaders. The reason is straightforward: intentions, and thus a country’s national security policies, can change suddenly. What matters for a leader’s calculations is whether the adversary has the instruments, including military capacity, to implement a revised policy. (p. 8)

This seems a reasonable proposition that simplifies the difficult problem of developing strategy. Intentions are fickle and subject to sudden change. Capabilities, by contrast, are relatively stable. They are the combined hardware, personnel, and doctrine that make up military forces. They have a substance to them which is countable and relatively certain. Defense analysts can be fairly certain that tanks will not suddenly transform into submarines. This stability makes it attractive to prioritize analyzing an opponent’s capabilities over identifying and analyzing their intent. It also tends towards the strategic shorthand of treating capability as intent. Unfortunately, ignoring intent or equating it with capability leads to flawed analysis for three reasons.

The first is that ignoring intent denies an opponent’s agency. War is a competitive endeavor between at least two opposing parties. If we are developing a strategy to achieve our goals it is because there is an opponent who would see our goals go unrealized. Our opponent can and will act in order to prevent us achieving our objectives. Our opponent will also act to achieve their own objectives, which are either diametrically opposed to ours, of a different nature, or somewhere in between. Ignoring intent is to argue that our opponent’s objectives are irrelevant to their behavior and that our opponent is simply an object to be acted upon. This never has and never will be the case in international relations. Opponents have the agency to act according to their own strategies in order to achieve their own objectives. To be clear, ignoring intent is not the same as saying an opponent’s intentions are difficult or impossible to comprehend. It is often difficult to identify an adversary’s true objectives, but it is always possible to propose a certain set of opponent intentions and assign a probability to each. It is also possible to discard a certain number of possible opponent goals, no matter how achievable. This thought experiment has the benefit of at least attempting to understand where our opponent is most likely to devote their finite resources and how they may develop their own strategy. Acknowledging an opponent’s agency ensures that we appreciate the inherently interactive nature of strategy as we seek to develop our own.

The second reason is that ignoring adversary intent prevents us from prioritizing our own limited resources. Looking at every enemy capability and asking how it will affect our strategy opens up a near infinite set of effects that must be considered and then countered if not moderated by a theory of most-likely adversary intentions. Take the following small example. Say Country A builds a squadron of advanced multi-role fighter aircraft capable of air defense, ground attack, and strike missions. Country B, a potential opponent, sees this and, ignoring Country A’s motives, determines these aircraft pose a threat to its own air, ground, and naval forces. It therefore develops countermeasures for its forces across all three domains, spending its resources to defeat Country A’s capability. Reasonable, no? But what if Country A had no intention of using these aircraft for the strike or ground attack roles? Country B wasted valuable, limited resources developing defenses against these capabilities. Or suppose Country A truly developed its military to defend against Country C. Country B’s resources were entirely wasted. A final case to consider is if Country B invested resources to build a military that never had any hope of matching Country A. In this case, assume that even if Country B devoted 100% of its gross domestic product to defense, Country A would still overmatch B’s military capabilities. Country B’s defense expenditure could be a total loss if the goal was to deter Country A. These are extremely simple examples, but history is rife with cases of wasted military expenditure designed to counter the wrong enemy or to deter the undeterrable. Focusing only on capabilities, the tendency is to expand threat horizons through well intentioned, but nearly infinite, what-ifs. These what-ifs demand answers, and answers cost money, time, and energy, all of which are limited. Again, strategy is interactive and we cannot consider opponent actions in a vacuum of their intentions.

The third reason is that even supposedly dispassionate capability analysis is subject to cognitive biases. The objects that define capabilities may be concrete, but that does not mean they are of necessity a firmer foundation for analysis. Ships arefamously black boxes impervious to detailed peacetime analysis. Haze gray and underway, two nation’s destroyers appear roughly the same, and admirals assume they will operate the same way. But this may simply be mirror-imaging. Perhaps, unbounded by our mental shackles, our opponent has developed some new tactic, technique, or procedure or improved weapon system that generates new possibilities for employing their ship. Ignoring to what end our opponent would use their ships, we are left open to assuming our own tactical and operational art on our opponent. A focus on the technical aspects of adversary capabilities, often necessary in the naval context, can also hamper attempts to come to deeper understandings of operational employment. Mirror-imaging is also a criticism leveled at defense analysts attempting to understand Chinese strategy. The argument in the cited article is that American analysts believe China is pursuing an A2/AD strategy because that is what the U.S. would do if it was in the same position as China and had the same capabilities as the People’s Liberation Army. Ignoring Chinese intentions is exactly the logic that results in equating PLA military capability with Chinese national strategy. Continuing to foster analysis that does not engage with Beijing’s known or likely intentions is not likely to result in better analysis. Cognitive bias is possible in analyzing capabilities and in understanding adversary strategies more widely. Ignoring adversary intentions only serves to make the problem worse by discarding half the material available for understanding an opponent’s strategy.

Ultimately, strategy is competitive. It is crafted to deal with living, breathing, thinking opponents. In order to defeat an opponent we must understand them. This requires empathy, which means intimately understanding their thought processes, fears, and ultimately their intentions. If we focus only on their capabilities we run not only the risk of misunderstanding their capabilities, but also projecting our own intentions on our opponents, leading to incorrect strategic conclusions. Analyzing military capability is difficult, and adding intent to the mix only makes it more difficult to create sound strategy. But ignoring an opponent’s intentions in developing strategy is like navigating dangerous waters using a chart without soundings.

Ian Sundstrom is a surface warfare officer in the United States Navy. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of the United States Department of Defense.

It is just here that the Institute might render important service to the profession by enlightening the public mind of the Navy on this subject, through the medium of essays and frequent discussions. — Admiral Stephen B. Luce, 1888, annual address as President of the U.S. Naval Institute

My personal theory of power, at least for the moment, has two parts. The first part comes from an idea broached by Mark Mandeles known as “levels of analysis.” The second part has to do with my own approach to exercising such power in ethical and, hopefully, altruistic ways in my own life through education, specifically educating minds to include the historical perspective. In other words, the theory followed by its application and execution in my own case.

Levels of Power — An Analysis

First, levels of analysis describe human interactions in terms of relationships. Generally, these levels fall into three groups: the individual, organizational, and institutional. Institutions are near the very top of social hierarchies and, in the words of Douglass North are, “society’s rules of the game.”[i] Translating this to a personal level, each human interaction occurs within these sorts of contexts and, therefore, for each of us, each interaction—as an individual, as a member of an organization or small cohesive team, and as a member of a larger institution—is pregnant with both possibility and limitation, occasionally leading to brilliant success or utter catastrophe. We influence others, wield our power as it were, in these situations and in different ways. Most interactions are at the personal level, but within teams and organizations, we behave a bit differently based, again, on the possibilities and limitations of our personal influence in that particular context. For example, parents exercise individual level power all the time with their children. At the organizational level we often think of our team, unit, or organization associated with employment. As one’s responsibility increases, so does the level of interaction and the ability to exercise personal power at the organizational level. However, for the audience that is probably reading this, we have folks who occasionally (or more often) exercise their power within institutional settings, as leaders of powerful institutions—for example Admiral Jonathan Greenert exercising his influence and authority as the US Navy service chief or David Petraeus when he was director of the CIA.

Education of the Historical Perspective

Back in the turbulent 20th Century an American historian named Thomas Bailey wrote A Diplomatic History of the American People. Bailey argued that the American people, through the power of public opinion, have always (one might say traditionally) exerted a profound influence on the foreign policy of the United States.[ii] This raises the issue of how does one influence the public opinion of the American people? N.A.M. Rodger dealt extensively with how the public mind is influenced by historical narratives and myths. He found that, contrary to perhaps conventional wisdom, Americans do use history to inform their public thinking, but that most of this history is flawed, wrong, or obscures what might have value coming to grips with the human past.[iii] I contend that the historical approach to influencing the public mind is not something that needs doing, rather it is something that needs doing correctly.

For Clausewitz and Mahan theory literally was study.

Minds as different and culturally divergent at Carl von Clausewitz, A.T. Mahan, and Mao Zedong all shared one trait in common when it came to military theory—theory should include study and when it came to war that study should be military history. For Clausewitz and Mahan theory literally was study.[iv] It is all well and good for the military professional to create his or her own theory by doing this (precisely what this series of articles is doing, after all), but how does this translate in power and influence? One means is through education, and not just military professionals or governmental elites, but the public. They get a vote.

For me it involves teaching, engaging if you will, with history as a means to educate the public mind—with individuals, groups, and in larger settings, at all levels. And so I teach primarily military and political history—at Fort Leavenworth, for Norwich University, at University of Kansas, for the Naval War College fleet seminar program, and frankly at any opportunity I get.

A theory is useless unless one employs it in a practical and daily manner.

[i] Friedman, Mandeles, and Hone, American and British Aircraft Carrier Development, 5-6. These authors cite Nobel Laureate Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York, 1993.) More recently, Mandeles acknowledges the role of Jean de Bloch’s pioneering analyses in The Future of War: Organizations as Weapons (Washington, DC, 2005) as contributing to his inspiration for the “levels of analysis” approach.

This essay is part of the Personal Theories of Power series, a joint Bridge–CIMSEC project which asked a group of national security professionals to provide their theory of power and its application. We hope this launches a long and insightful debate that may one day shape policy.

Matthew Hallex and Bruce Sugden are defense analysts in Northern Virginia. Their opinions are their own and do not represent those of their employer or clients.

Harold Winton suggests “strategic theory has one foot in reality and another in concepts.”[1] Strategic thinking about nuclear weapons, as practiced in the United States, certainly has one foot in concepts, but its grounding in reality is much shakier. Nuclear thinkers had no data-rich nuclear history to work from and so they built their theory upon deductive models. The result is a body of thought that reflects less an understanding of the worth of nuclear weapons for military practitioners than a collection of elegant models and American preferences that are confused with universal truths. In addressing the topic of nuclear weapons and strategy, we attempt to offer not a novel construct for thinking about nuclear weapons, but to highlight some of the shortcomings of the dominant approach to thinking about strategy and nuclear weapons and to suggest some guideposts to improve strategic thinking.

What’s the use of strategic theory?

Strategic theory should assist the strategist in formulating an effective strategy and should shed light on the proper use of force.[2] The primary take-away a strategic theory should offer the military practitioner is not a collection of lessons that will lead to victory, but, as Frans Osinga stated in his study of John Boyd’s strategic thinking, an illumination of guideposts or “things that need thinking about. It must provide insight and questions, not answers.”[3] This echoes Clausewitz’s observation that theory is a guide to self-education.[4] It is about creating the proper cast of mind to think about the use of force in a particular strategic environment and to consider the relationships between ends, ways, and means within that context.

What is wrong with the dominant U.S. approach to thinking strategically about nuclear weapons?

Lawrence Freedman makes a useful distinction between strategists and the group of “nuclear specialists” who arose in the early days of the Cold War when the insights of classical strategy seemed inadequate to the challenge posed by nuclear weapons.[5] These specialists developed nuclear thought into a technical discipline that relied on deductions and models and grew insensitive to the operational and political challenges of nuclear use — the challenges that a strategic theory must address if it is to be useful for practitioners.

The escalation ladder is one example of the work of nuclear specialists. While the 44 rungs of Herman Kahn’s ladder, covering all states of conflict from peace to Armageddon, has value as an analytical heuristic, its value for military practitioners is less clear. As Colin Gray points out “because one can conceive of thresholds for thought, it does not follow that those thresholds in fact exist. An escalation ladder, in the minds of a harassed policy maker, may offer an illusion of control…that is likely to be negated by the systemic nature of conflict. In the mind of the adversary, some of the rungs may be missing.”[6]

To wit, the ladder metaphor has never fit well with the Russians’ view of escalation. While the American approach to escalation, which often times is incremental and gradual, was reflected in the linear concept of the escalation ladder, Russian strategic thought has seemed to have at its core the idea of “rapid, large-scale escalation.” In the 1960s, Russian strategists expected intercontinental nuclear strikes between the United States and the Soviet Union to occur at the same time as, or precede, major combat in the theaters bordering the Soviet Union.[7] Furthermore, as Stephen Meyer showed in his study of Soviet doctrinal writings, the “destruction of military-industrial targets in the strategic rear (i.e., in the US and Britain) would have taken place during the initial stages of the conflict.”[8] In the 1990s, former Soviet military officers and defense officials revealed to DOD contractors that in the 1970s the Soviets did not think of “managing a nuclear war by climbing a ladder of escalation . . . .”[9]

Since 2000, in the wake of U.S.-NATO military operations against Serbia, Russian strategists have been speaking of “de-escalation of military operations” with an eye on deterring the intervention of the West into conflicts within Russia’s “Near Abroad.” In other words, they are thinking about employing nuclear weapons to compel a strong opponent to de-escalate and lower tensions on terms favorable to Russia.[10] Russian military exercises and simulations have included “limited” nuclear strikes against military targets in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and in the continental United States using long-range air-launched cruise missiles.[11]

Contemporary American strategic dialogue has done little to address the inadequacies of “golden age” nuclear thinking. Rather, it has abandoned serious thinking about the role of nuclear weapons in strategy. A tremendous amount of ink is spilled discussing the characteristics and strategies of a conflict between China and the United States, for example, with almost no thinking about the role of nuclear weapons aside from a generalized desire to “control escalation” and remove the prospect of nuclear use from consideration in that envisioned great power war. The discussion of the role of nuclear weapons in the national security of the United States is reduced to determining the smallest number targets to be serviced rather than engaging with the strategies and doctrines embraced by our potential adversaries.[12]

These decades-spanning problems with the U.S. approach to thinking strategically about nuclear weapons have a common problem: they confuse U.S. preferences and experiences with universal insights into the nature of nuclear weapons. For the early nuclear thinkers it was a product of lacking insight into what Russia and other nuclear states thought about nuclear weapons and how they developed their strategies and doctrines. In the face of incomplete information, the early thinkers extrapolated from U.S. nuclear thought. Contemporary U.S. thinkers, broadly speaking, have decided that nuclear use is impossible or at least serves no military ends, and therefore it is simply unnecessary to engage as seriously with nuclear weapons as their Russian and Chinese counterparts continue to do.

How to improve strategic thought

How then should we think strategically about nuclear weapons? Strategic thinking needs to be liberated from dense prose and a fondness for systems analysis and game theory (as useful as they are in their own right) in looking at particular military problems and made accessible to practitioners. Nuclear thought that would be useful for military practitioners will have three features:

1. Placing nuclear weapons in the broader strategic context. “Nuclear strategy” is not a separate beast from “strategy.” While the technical implications of nuclear weapons were significant they did not truly change the nature of war, nor did they change the ways by which we should think about it. Strategic designs and campaign plans ultimately act upon human minds to shape decision-making, but because we cannot know with certainty how adversary decision makers will develop their own strategies and react to our strategy and threats, even a strategy of deterrence has to have at its core war-making capabilities.[13] Plain and simple: a strategy designed to deter nuclear weapons use might fail, and so the United States might have to employ nuclear weapons to achieve its war aims. If nuclear strategy is to be useful it must be grounded in the broader strategic discussion focused on human psychology, decisions, and action. Thucydides and Clausewitz are no less useful in the nuclear age, and nuclear weapons and operations should be integrated into this deeper conversation about the ways U.S. means could be employed to achieve political ends.

2. Nuclear thought has national character. U.S. thinking about nuclear weapons must be responsive to foreign ideas about nuclear use if it is to be relevant to military practitioners. Furthermore, most bodies of military theory reflect the contributions of thinkers from different national and strategic contexts, addressing different geopolitical and military challenges and different technical environments. Mahan and Corbett offer different and often contradictory approaches to addressing seapower but make the discussion richer for it. In the contributions of the U.S. thinkers of the Cold War, we may have our nuclear Mahan. Now we need to be on the lookout for a nuclear Corbett among the thinkers of Russia, China, and other nuclear powers.

3. Thinking about nuclear weapons and strategy should be military minded. Nuclear weapons are not an abstraction; they are weapons. If strategy is to be serious it must grapple with this fact directly. Taking a lesson from Russian strategic thinking and nuclear war planning, we need to think about how countries might employ nuclear weapons in conjunction with other means to achieve their ends, and how the United States might have to threaten to use or actually employ nuclear weapons to achieve its war aims, especially if preferred conventional military means turn out to be inadequate to the military tasks at hand.[14] U.S. policies can change quickly in a crisis or a conflict when the president determines that vital U.S. interests are at stake, and U.S. military practitioners need to be ready to apply all the military tools at the disposal of the president.